Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Coming soon: the Financial Secrecy Index

Two weeks ago we launched our new website for the Mapping the Faultlines project, which explores the furtive world of secrecy jurisdictions where furtive types get up to all sorts of monkey business.

Now we launch another site, www.financialsecrecyindex.com which takes you step-by-step into the details of our new ranking of secrecy jurisdictions. The ranking results will be published at the start of November, but we the know the results already and we can confidently say that they will turn many people's pre-conceptions on their head.

We are also fairly confident that the rankings we publish in the Financial Secrecy Index will replace the failed OECD black / grey / white lists which came out in April 2009. The latest story from Business Times of Singapore highlights the hollowness of the OECD process:

"With Singapore poised to graduate to the 'white list' of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), trust and estate practitioners are confident that there are sufficient safeguards in place to prevent indiscriminate prying into taxpayers' accounts."

In other words: don't worry, criminals and abusers - if we get onto the white list, your secrets will still be safe with us. The Financial Secrecy Index will reveal, for the first time, what is really going on.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As the Financial Secrecy Index is comming, the Luxembourg Institute for Global Financial INtegrity is posting its first articles on its website 5 months after the official launch (the website was created in Decembre 2008 by a Luxembourg-based company whose job is economic itelligence).

It is a luxembourgish economic intelligence operation in a jurisdiction:
- where critics are repudiated (Cf. censorship of Rainer Falk's report after pressure and threats on NGOs),
- where regulation is perfectible because of the conflicts of interests and the direct say of professionals in the drawing up of laws and regulations that are applicable to them, which is practically an assent.


It is amazing to observe that 3 members out of 4 of the board of regents are both Luxembourgish and politicians (Jean-Claude Juncker, Jacques Santer and Lucien Thiel). The last member of the board of regents is Swiss.

Above all it is amazing to observe they state that the Luxembourg Institute for Global Financial Integrity will post publications that it deems of particular interest and significance in the support and promotion of professional excellence, ethics and integrity in the global financial sector.

See http://www.ligfi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71&Itemid=107

They quote publications and works from the CFA Institute, Transparency International (including the CPI for 2009 that does not exist), Global Witness and the Financial Stability Board.

They ignore Global Financial Integrity, Tax Justice Network and the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development.

In a nutshell, according to LIGFI none of the above powerhouses in the debate - that proved reliable contrary to LIGFI - deems of particular interest and significance in the support and promotion of professional excellence, ethics and integrity in the global financial sector.

Jérôme Turquey
http://ethiquedesplaces.blogspirit.com

8:57 am  

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